Throughout the novel, Jacob learns that “family” can mean many different things. He adores his grandfather, while he and his parents struggle to maintain good relationships. One of the difficult things about family is that it can often come with pain: for example, Jacob’s dad struggled to relate to Jacob’s grandfather growing up, and Jacob inherits nightmares about monsters from his grandfather. At the same time, Jacob finds a different kind of family when he discovers the kids at Miss Peregrine’s, who adopt him into their group and whom he quickly grows to love, but who also derail his life significantly and force him to make a difficult choice about his life path. By showing these different aspects of family, the book illustrates how complicated families can be, as they are often both the sources of pain and conflict as well as love and support.
Jacob’s biological family—particularly his relationships with his dad and grandfather, and his dad’s and Abe’s relationship—illustrates how families can provide a great deal of love and support but can also be sources of deep conflict. Growing up, Jacob idolizes his grandfather and wants to believe in his tales about the magical children’s home in which he grew up. But as Jacob becomes older and surmises that his grandfather’s stories cannot be true, he grows more distant from his grandfather. At times, Jacob even believes that his grandfather may have been both a liar and an adulterer, which pains Jacob greatly. By book’s end, Jacob realizes that his grandfather didn’t tell him about being peculiar so that Jacob could have an “ordinary life,” but he still struggles with the idea that his grandfather wasn’t fully honest with him. This arc illustrates how he’s both grateful to his grandfather but also frustrated about the things his grandfather withheld. Jacob and his dad also struggle to get along, particularly when Jacob’s dad accompanies Jacob to Cairnholm (where the children’s home is located) to help Jacob understand his grandfather’s history. They fight frequently because Jacob’s dad resents Jacob for having a better relationship with Abe than he did. Jacob feels like a “seventy-year-old hurt [has] somehow been passed down to [him] like some poisonous heirloom.” By taking something that often has positive connotations like an heirloom and making it “poisonous,” Jacob illustrates how the positive aspects of family—like inherited love and support—can also come with inherited pain. Reflecting on the pain in his father’s and grandfather’s relationship, Jacob surmises that Abe wanted a family, but that he was so scared of losing people after being orphaned that he struggled to bond with Jacob’s dad. Additionally, Jacob’s dad doesn’t believe his father’s stories and thinks that Abe’s mental acuity is slipping when he starts talking about monsters chasing him. In this way, Jacob’s dad and Abe both hurt each other even as they want desperately to maintain a loving relationship.
Jacob’s adopted family—the children at Miss Peregrine’s home—also generate both love and conflict in Jacob’s life. As Jacob spends more and more time with the children at Miss Peregrine’s, he understands how fond he is of them—building a set of friends in a way that he has never been able to before, and even starting a romantic relationship with a girl named Emma. The kids help him learn more about his grandfather and his history, and when Jacob begins to protect them from outside threats like evil wights and hollows, one of them even tells Jacob, “welcome to the family.” They allow Jacob to realize that family can be any group of people that are bonded by mutual love and support, as the children are. However, even Jacob’s newfound family can provoke difficult decisions. They leave Jacob with a choice: to leave behind everything he knows to live with them, or to return to his parents. Jacob is tormented by the question, deeply wanting to protect the children and Emma, but unsure if he wants to give up his normal, present-day life in order to do so. This suggests that building a family in and of itself can lead to conflict, because any bond of love will also inevitably come with hard decisions and sacrifices.
Both biological and adopted families have their joys and challenges for Jacob, and he ultimately grapples with whether to remain with his parents or venture out with the other children. Ultimately, Jacob’s choice to live with his chosen family doesn’t necessarily mean he’s turning his back completely on his biological family—as he reconnects with his grandfather’s history, it’s clear that his biological family continues to be important to him even as he forges a new path among fellow peculiars.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Family ThemeTracker
Family Quotes in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
When I was six I decided that my only chance of having a life half as exciting as Grandpa Portman’s was to become an explorer. He encouraged me by spending afternoons at my side hunched over maps of the world, plotting imaginary expeditions with trails of red pushpins and telling me about the fantastic places I would discover one day. At home I made my ambitions known by parading around with a cardboard tube held to my eye, shouting, “Land ho!” and “Prepare a landing party!” until my parents shooed me outside. I think they worried that my grandfather would infect me with some incurable dreaminess from which I’d never recover—that these fantasies were somehow inoculating me against more practical ambitions—so one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
I guess he’d seen it coming—I had to grow out of them eventually—but he dropped the whole thing so quickly it left me feeling like I’d been lied to. I couldn’t understand why he’d made up all that stuff, tricked me into believing that extraordinary things were possible when they weren’t. It wasn’t until a few years later that my dad explained it to me: Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth—because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.
It was true, of course, what my dad had said: I did worship my grandfather. There were things about him that I needed to be true, and his being an adulterer was not one of them. When I was a kid, Grandpa Portman’s fantastic stories meant it was possible to live a magical life. Even after I stopped believing them, there was still something magical about my grandfather. To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and good and brave person I knew him to be—that was magical. So I couldn’t believe he was a liar and a cheater and a bad father. Because if Grandpa Portman wasn’t honorable and good, I wasn’t sure anyone could be.
“I wonder if it doesn’t explain something, though. Why he acted so distant when you were little.” Dad gave me a sharp look, and I knew I needed to make my point quickly or risk overstepping. “He’d already lost his family twice before. Once in Poland and then again here—his adopted family. So when you and Aunt Susie came along…”
“Once bombed, twice shy?”
“I’m serious. Don’t you think this could mean that maybe he wasn’t cheating on Grandma, after all?”
“I don’t know, Jake. I guess I don’t believe things are ever that simple.” He let out a sigh, breath fogging the inside of his beer glass. “I think I know what all this really explains, though. Why you and Grandpa were so close.”
“Okay…”
“It took him fifty years to get over his fear of having a family. You came along at just the right time.”
I didn’t know how to respond. How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad? I couldn’t, so instead I just said goodnight and headed upstairs to bed.
I couldn’t stop myself, so I thought about all the bad things and I fed it and fed it until I was crying so hard I had to gasp for breath between sobs. I thought about how my great-grandparents had starved to death. I thought about their wasted bodies being fed to incinerators because people they didn’t know hated them. I thought about how the children who lived in this house had been burned up and blown apart because a pilot who didn’t care pushed a button. I thought about how my grandfather’s family had been taken from him, and how because of that my dad grew up feeling like he didn’t have a dad, and now I had acute stress and nightmares and was sitting alone in a falling-down house and crying hot, stupid tears all over my shirt. All because of a seventy-year-old hurt that had somehow been passed down to me like some poisonous heirloom, and monsters I couldn’t fight because they were all dead, beyond killing or punishing or any kind of reckoning. At least my grandfather had been able to join the army and go fight them. What could I do?
“But the larger world turned against us long ago. The Muslims drove us out. The Christians burned us as witches. Even the pagans of Wales and Ireland eventually decided that we were all malevolent faeries and shape-shifting ghosts.”
“So why didn’t you just—I don’t know—make your own country somewhere? Go and live by yourselves?”
“If only it had been that simple,” she said. “Peculiar traits often skip a generation, or ten. Peculiar children are not always, or even usually, born to peculiar parents, and peculiar parents do not always, or even usually bear peculiar children. Can you imagine, in a world so afraid of otherness, why this would be a danger to all peculiar-kind?”
“Because normal parents would be freaked out if their kids started to, like, throw fire?”
“Exactly, Mr. Portman. The peculiar offspring of common parents are often abused and neglected in the most horrific ways.”
I was moved by this new idea of my grandfather, not as a paranoiac gun nut or a secretive philanderer or a man who wasn’t there for his family, but as a wandering knight who risked his life for others, living out of cars and cheap motels, stalking lethal shadows, coming home shy a few bullets and marked with bruises he could never quite explain and nightmares he couldn’t talk about. For his many sacrifices, he received only scorn and suspicion from those he loved.
